from washington the mclaughlin group, the american original. for over three decades sources, hardest talk. issue one. still chief. thank you, thank you so much. tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own

destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward. tonight, in this election you, the american people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up. we have fought our way back, and we know, in our hearts, that for the united states of america, the best is yet to come. whether you held an obama sign or a romney sign, you made your voice heard and you made a difference. the tally. president obama 50%. 58 millian votes. mitt romney, 48%. 56 million votes. so much for the popular vote. the electoral vote. 270 needed to win.

president obama 303, governor romney 206. still unassigned, 29, florida is conducting a recount. was this election a mandate, a landslide, a rout, a speaker, a marginal win, what was it? >> it is a significant victory by the president of the united states by more than 2 million votes, john. i don't believe it is a mandate. >> why isn't a mandate if it is such a big win? >> a mandate for what? a mandate to work together, certainly the entire country wants that. but the real fire bell in the night on this election is for the republican party. there are 100 million folks in this country who are black, brown, asian, hispanic, middle eastern, they voted between 70 and 90% democratic and the white vote only went by 18 points to mitt romney. john of the seven largest states in the country, illinois, new

york, pennsylvania, california have gone democratic in six straight elections. the other two, ohio and florida have swung democratic in two elections. and in texas, the white folks in chief connection texas -- texas are now a minority. do you think this was a split verdict? >> not at al the president won 51.4% of the popular vote which he becomes the sixth president in history to win two terms with over 50% of the dwight eisenhower, i might add. he won an electoral college landslide. george w. bush with a much smaller electoral win pronounced he had a mandate. this president is not going to use that language, it is oh, so 20th century, not how he intends to govern. but beneath the numbers of a reelected president, a senate that is divided, there was an

earthquake. it was an election that, republicans should have won in a bad economy, with all that money, and they lost virtually every group. they even lost cubans in florida, which used to reliable vote. so you have to ask what does the republican party do next? but that is not my top priority frankly. >> don't broad brush it excessively. the republicans kept the house, the democrats kept the senate and the president, a democrat, kept the white house. that is a split verdict. >> beneath those numbers there was an earthquake john. >> oh, the hidden earthquake. nobody felt it? >> everybody feels it. >> nothing on the restrictter scale but there was -- on the scale. when you think we had 23 million people unemployed and the worst in our history and he still carried it through.

i would call it a landslide under the conditions he had to run. i think it was a decisive victory. >> it was on several counts. first the exit polling showed most of the voters did blame the economic problems on bush and they wanted to give obama more time to work on it. pretty significant considering expectations said just the opposite. >> do you remember how many people attended his victory speech in 2008 in the stadium in chicago? >> 240,000. you know how many were there this year? >> 10,000. >> how do you explain that? >> this one was indoors. >> come on now, you know, what was the percentage of the. >> can i get back to your mandate question? very important mandate. >> it is a split verdict. it was a close election. >> no, no. >> john, the republicans lost

at every level, john. >> if you compare this with obama. >> they lost the house the senate and the white house. >> you compare this with 2008 he won by 205. in 2012 it was only 332. >> he won all the battleground states except two. you are seeing demographic is fts. yet. okay. mitt misses his moment. >> we aired this video last week and we are airing it again. in the wake of hurricane sandy, republican governor chris christie, whose state of new jersey was ravaged by the storm took this question from fox. >> reporter: is there any possibility governor romney may go to new jersey to tour some of the damage with you? >> i have no idea, nor am i the least bit concerned or interested. >> now look at this photo of

whom governor christie did tour the damage with. president obama. now here's christie on obama's win over romney. time and effort traordinarily into the mitt romney campaign. >> did governor romney, mort, commit a huge mistake by not going to the storm ravaged new jersey coast, joining governor christie and president obama, who were both on the scene? was it a telling mistake? because it was all over the news, night after night as after night for the week preceding the election. >> that's right. it was a mistake in retrospect. but the real mistake romney made was the way he handled chris christie when he was picking a vice presidential partner and christie was extremely alienated by whatever that process was. but absolutely, romney had the chance to show up and be a player and be a visual player on all of television and he wasn't

there. >> what could be said that he would be capital liesing on a nonpolitical event. >> that is the point. >> that is not the point. >> that is the point. >> the head of the party ought to be there. >> he had no role, and he wisely stepped aside. he would have been accused of political op pour tunism. it would have hurt him more. >> that is the equation you have, but it was evident he was not there. >> why do you have to diminish the president's achievement here? >> i'm not diminishing it. he won the election. >> he didn't win it because of chris christie. >> chris christie, i think is well-suited to be one of the leaders of the party right now that is trying to search for its soul again. >> chris christie doesn't want to wait for eight years.

now he has to wait for four years. >> let me just say this. romney did not have, shall we say, an easy contact with the american people. he wasn't that kind of candidate, okay? this was another illustration where he could have had a much better connection given what was happening. >> if he had gone. >> john, let me get into this. first i think it would have been a mistake for him to show up. >> oh give me a break. >> there is nothing he could have done there. people would have said what are you doing, handing out canned food? >> however let me say this about christie. there is nothing wrong that christie did. but that gratuitous shot at romney and the statements he made have damaged him with a lot of folks who understand that he ought to have the president in there, but there is no reason to back hand mitt romney. >> do you think it was an accidental back stab? >> i think the president's

intsession in this -- intersession in that storm very much sealed his election. do you think christie has something else he wants? >> he is going to have a tough time in the republican party if he runs. >> if we are going to talk about romney's mistakes in the primaries when he got to the right of every other republican on immigration and secondly when he said he was going to defund planned parenthood, that was a gold mine for the democrats who really got out the new american elect rat, a lot of unmarried women. >> everybody thought he was unstable. that he hadn't real clear convictions. exit poll. even after the ballots are cast and the tallying is done, there is one more set of polls political junkies love. the exit polls. i hope i'm not overburdening you on this. here are some of the findings from male nationwide

nationwide usa today. women obama usa today. women obama 55%, get a load of this. romney 43%. question. women are counted for 53% of the elect rat. was romney's deficit among women the decisive factor in his loss? >> yes. but this is not unusual. the reason is, john, there are tens of millions of single women with kids, who depend upon government for all the benefits and for the food, for the education, medication and all these things, and these folks generally vote and continue to vote democratic, because they see the republican party as a party that is an enemy of government from which they get benefits and they don't pay taxes. >> these women, by the way, work. >> some of them work, no doubt about it. >> well a majority of them actually, and you know, we always think about welfare

moms. a lot of divorced moms, middle class moms are raising their families, working hard. any kind of support is important, and they want to feel like the government cares about them. >> there is another thing. >> i'm married to a woman, yes. >> that is what this chair is. >> look. mid and a lot of working class folks really feel that this economy doesn't work for them any longer. and women are particularly critical. let's get another sample. voters by age. age. 60%, romney 36%. why are they still with president obama? >> he is a casematic someone that appeals. most of them are young, they are in school, they don't pay taxes, they get student loans. >> listen, we have george wallace in 1968 won the youth

vote. they go to the extremes. >> they are social liberals also. they have tolerant views about marriage and gay people and pot, everything. >> it is culture. hook-up culture. okay retirees age 65 and older. obama 44%, romney 55%. what about that? do you want to speak to that? >> as a retirement age person, no, you know, older folks are more, i'm afraid so. i have got my medicare card john. older voters, of course more conservative in regard to the social change. i think the whole idea of a guy named barack obama, with an african background in his family being president. >> get a little bit more race

in 40%,40%, romney 58%. black americans, obama 93%, romney 6%. hispanic americans, obama 69%, romney 29%. asian americans, hold on on obama 74%, romney 25%. question. where did president obama pick up such exhaustive ethnic support? >> most important i think is the hispanic support. when you consider if romney had gotten the hispanic turnout george w. bush had eight years earlier, he would be president right now. during the debates and all, you saw one signal after the another to the hispanic community that turned them off. meanwhile barack obama signed an executive order that stated a tem prayer version of the dream act, which helped him make up for the fact he hasn't pushed for immigration reform. >> mitt romney got the same share of the white vote ronald

reagan did. and ronald reagan won a landslide. what happened was the white vote in those days was 88% and it is now down to 72% and falling. you have to get higher and higher shares of it. impossible shares of it for the republicans and that is the demographic did disaster. >> it is not a disaster. they have to reach out to nonwhites. >> since, see pat get the picture. 15 years. >> it has taken that long. >> why did black votes vote 9-1 against hillary clinton in mississippi? >> they supported her overwhelmingly initially. >> remember when black folks supported hillary 2-1 over obama? remember that? that went out the window. >> not just because of race, otherwise, they would be how soon i forget, the pizza man. how soon i forget.

>> herman cain. >> he got 1.6 million fewer african-american votes than he got in 2008. >> because there has been a little bit of disappointment. i would say about that much. >> turnout is smaller john. >> what did they want him to do that he didn't do? >> he hasn't done anything specifically targeting the black community. because the administration is slow to punish it that way. obamacare and right down the line disproportionately helped low income folks, including black folks. >> all groups was down. romney this election was minus 10 million or something from the last election. he got 93%.

issue two. common ground. >> mr. president, this is your moment. we are ready to be led. not as democrats or

republicans, but as americans. let's challenge ourselves to find the common ground that has eluded us. >> i'm open to compromise. i'm open to new ideas. i'm committed to solving our fiscal challenges. but, i refuse to accept any approach that isn't balanced. i'm not going to ask students and seniors and middle class families to pay down the entire deficit while people like me, making over $250,000, aren't asked to pay a dime more in taxes. i'm not going to do that. >> gridlock is the new big task facing barack obama and the u.s. congress. gridlock over the so-called fiscal cliff. what's the fiscal or better put financial cliff? think of it as a high, steep rock. a ledge the u.s. is teetering

on and will plunge over if no action is taken on certain financial matters. what are those? one, the bush era tax cuts. in 2001 and 2003, congress, under president george w. bush, lowered everyone's taxes. but it was only temporary, like 11 years temporary. less than two months from now midnight december 31, taxes go back up. the average household will pay more in taxes each year, $2000 to $3500 more. two, sequestration. what's that? new, big budget cuts. $110 billion in cuts in 2013 alone. they go into effect january 2, and will affect the defense budget and the domestic budget.

the cbo, says unemployment could climb up over 9%, pushing the u.s. back into recession. why did this happen? an automatic sequestration or permanent set aside of $1.2 trillion was passed by congress, in order to force congress to compromise and figure out how to cut the budget itself. but, a congressional supercommittee of house and senate members failed to reach a deal last year. now the clock has run out and the budget will be cut automatically. in reaction to this situation and other factors, one day after president obama was reelected, the dow industrial average dropped 315 points. question, the two day stock market sell off following president obama's reelection is the 434-point drop in the dow jones industrial average. wiping out some $50 billion in

investor equity. why are the markets negative on his reelection? >> they are not negative on his reelection. they are worried the congress is not going to be able to come together with the white house to solve the fiscal cliff. >> which is occasioned by the election of president obama. >> no it isn't. the markets would have gone down regardless. >> i don't agree with that at all. >> you hear mort? >> absolutely not. there is real concern over obama's leadership for the economy and good reason for that, given what's happened. but this fiscal cliff, as they say, is essentially a suicide packet, intended to force the congress to deal with it. it is not a rational way of getting the deficit under control. and the question is will obama and the republicans in the house be able to reach an agreement? there is a lot of doubt. they are all going to make the right rhetoric. they are sounding better, we'll see what happens. there is no trust between them. that is a big, big problem. >> i think the republicans will

fight to hold the 35% but they are going to do what mitt romney recommended, cap deductions and exemptions and things like that. but they better get a deal. >> i i want a judgment on this before we leave. exit question. will there be a grand compromise between obama and the republicans to avoid the fiscal cliff before christmas? yes or no? >> before the new year, yeah. >> and i don't mize road mac map and the president will not cave on getting the rich to pay more. >> yes, there will be. >> they may take it right over the cliff for a day, but they are going to get it. >> the answer is, it is too close

we know where they've taken her.

shhhh! we're here to save the princess. but the princess is sleeping. sorry. imagine what a little time can do for your family. shhhh! the princess is sleeping. oh, sorry! excuse us. shhh-shh!

predictions pat? >> i think they'll get a deal and as i said the 35% will be maintained and they'll give up deductions and exemptions. eleanor? the dream act will pass probably in the next year. republicans will rush to cooperate. even sean has beenty at fox says he is evolving on immigration. the europeans are continuing press down the value of the euro in order to value exports to the united states and diminish u.s. exports to europe. congressman jesse jackson jr. who was reelected despite not campaigning will step down and be replaced possibly by his wife or brother. i